Comics Reviews: Wonder Woman 228, Green Lantern 93, Warlord 5

The story starts with Wonder Woman flying around in her invisible plane, when a weird rocket ship comes through a “hole” in the air and almost collides with a jet. WW saves the jet and finds out the rocket is occupied by a Nazi called Red Panzer. He seems familiar with her, but is surprised to find her in 1976. As they fight, a grapple ray pulls them and the rocket back through the hole in the air. WW is startled to find she’s now in Washington, D.C. And even more startled to find out she’s on Earth-2 and it’s 1943. Red Panzer dumps her into the street and takes off and she tries to blend into her new environment … with mixed results. The 1943 Wonder Woman shows up and they fight (since Earth-2 WW won’t meet her counterpart for decades), delighting fanboys everywhere. The 1943 WW uses her magic lasso to get the truth from Earth-1 WW; I guess Diana could’ve said “Hey, why don’t you just tie me up.” as soon as they met… but that might’ve been misconstrued. The two head for Red Panzer’s base so Diana can return to her own time (and Earth) through another of Panzer’s breaches. Apparently, he built a machine that could see the future and was trying to get to D-Day in 1944 to fuck things up for the Allies, but overshot and ended up in 1976—and on the wrong Earth. Diana is sent through the breach, but the return grappler setting is altered, so the rocket comes back sooner than anticipated. So, while Earth-2 WW captures Red Panzer, she’s knocked out by the returning rocket. We’ll have to wait for next issue to see what happens, and we’ll now be following the adventures of the Earth-2 WW for the foreseeable future.

Noticeable Things:

Obviously this whole WW II adventure was inspired by the Wonder Woman TV show which was on at the time (there’s even a write-up in the back of the issue about it); makes sense, since the the first season of the show was set during the War.

Post-Crisis, Wonder Woman’s existence during WW II was wiped out. But later they tried to make most of her 1940s adventures canon by saying a disguised Hippolyta took her place, so I guess most of these stories are considered canon again … or were, pre-Flashpoint.

There’s a helpful diagram explaining the Earth-One/Earth-Two thing, as well as the time-travel aspect of this particular story.

Some of the anachronisms are funny, like when WW calls the salesgirl “Ms.” instead of “Miss”.

WW scratches the date off a coin she uses to pay for a dress; but the dress was $15, so did she pay all in coins? Maybe she stuffs her Amazon bra with them? I dunno, but it’d be kinda hard to scratch the date (and Treasury Secretary’s signature) off bank notes from the future.

Wanna go catch the new Tallulah Bankhead movie with me?

After the two Wonder Women fight, there’s a scene where they look like they’re about to kiss; and lo, slash fic was born on that day! Or maybe that’s just my own filthy mind at work.

This one starts with a homeless looking guy named Abner spending Thanksgiving in a soup kitchen. In contrast, we soon see a gathering at Carol Ferris’s fancy mansion. Besides Carol, the guests include Hal Jordan, Oliver Queen, Dinah Lance, Tom Kalamaku, and (sigh) Itty. Hal gets a distress signal from the Guardians and takes off to rescue a bunch of “financially challenged” people are being sucked into a space warp. GL gets zapped by a yellow beam, so he uses the ring to watch the spaceship from a distance. It heads for Hong Kong to abduct more poor people. GL disguises himself and gets sucked up with them. The warp deposits everyone on a barren planet and a bunch of droopy-faced aliens tell them they’ll be given tools and food in exchange for terraforming the planet.If the colony lasts for seven years, they get their freedom plus a bonus. It’s like the Homestead Act taken to extremes. Some of the people sound interested, but GL throws off his disguise and says it’s basically slavery. He invades the alien ship, getting past the crew easily and beating the shit out of the captain, who’s surrounded by a yellow energy field. GL offers to take the abducted people home, but about half of them (including Abner) want to stay and make a good life for themselves on the planet, since they don’t really have a chance of that on Earth. The aliens must’ve been abducting people for a while (there are other, blue-skinned aliens on this colony planet), because they whip up a Thanksgiving dinner and invite GL to stay. Back on Earth, Green Arrow is showing off for Carol and the others when some Feds bust in and grab him. They conk him out and drag him off (despite protests from Dinah and Carol) saying he’s under arrest.

When the aliens dump the captured humans on the barren planet, there’s a woman with blue skin and pink hair … I was wondering what part of Earth she was from and I figured maybe she was meant to be a punk-rocker and got miscoloured accidentally. But later there’s another blue-skinned woman, so they must’ve been scooped up from some other planet.

When Oliver’s showing off his archery skills at the end of the issue, Carol is dressed like a refugee from Paradise Island.

The guys who arrest Ollie are from the “FIA”; I guess that’s a cross between the FBI and the CIA?

Warlord #5 – “The Secret of Skartaris” – (Mike Grell)

This issue begins with Travis Morgan and his army of former slaves making their way back to Shamballah, Tara’s home city. But the army is growing smaller by the day as the freed slaves return to their homes. The group runs into a T-Rex in a narrow defile and most of them scatter. Morgan and Tara climb a cliff and drop a boulder on the T-Rex’s head, but when the boulder is dislodged, it reveals an opening in the cliffside. Since their men will be a while rounding up their terrified horses, Morgan and Tara go inside to explore the cave and find an ancient Atlantean computer. When Morgan accidentally activates it, they see the history of Skartaris: before the fall of Atlantis, some smart Atlanteans took off and found their way through the North Pole into the Hollow Earth. They built great cities (including Shamballah) using solar-powered computers. But they ended up fighting (as humans usually do) and destroyed most of the technology. The radiation mutated them to varying degrees and they reverted to barbarism, which explains the different tribes and races now populating Skartaris. The computer also tells them that Deimos was using it to fool people into thinking he could wield magic. Morgan and Tara are attacked by some Hyaenadons and find another chamber, with a subway-type vehicle. Morgan gets in (they’re not even married yet and he’s already ignoring her advice), thinking they might be able to ride it back to Shamballah, but it starts up and takes off with him inside, leaving Tara behind. Morgan is knocked out and when he comes to, the “train” has stopped. When he emerges, he finds himself back on Earth … and he isn’t too happy about it. Tara must be a hell of a woman. We’ll see if Morgan makes it back to her next issue, but on Monday check out my reviews of Batman 285 (more Tzin-Tzin fun), and Detective 468 with that master criminal, the Calculator.

Noticeable Things:

The main theme of Warlord (at least in the beginning) is that modern man’s pretensions of “civilization” are just a thin veneer; when Morgan is thrown into Skartaris, he not only adapts, he lets his savage side loose and actually thrives. And as we’ll see, he comes to enjoy it. Maybe it’s a catharthis for Morgan, a way of getting out all his aggression without going against the rules of society. I’m not sure Grell’s saying it’s a good thing or a bad thing, it’s just something that’s going on with this character (although other Grell characters—like Green Arrow and Jon Sable—have the same civilized/savage dichotomy to some extent).

Mike Grell’s art works great for the “savage world” aspects of the comic.

In case you’re wondering about the first four issues: Travis Morgan was flying a spy plane over Russia in 1969, he was shot down and ended up in Skartaris (which is inside the Hollow Earth), met Tara who taught him how to use a sword, and freed a bunch of slaves while heading back to Tara’s city. Morgan ended up fighting a wizard named Deimos, who seemed to have magical powers, though we saw in this issue that a lot of that was trickery using ancient Atlantean technology. We’ll be seeing Deimos again.